Jack Kemp Quotes

I played football.. my football was kosher.. no pigskin.

Football is a metaphor for the kind of country we want to create. It's based on merit.

Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong - wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.

People want opportunity so they can earn security.

Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort.

I unabashedly, unashamedly, unequivocally support the explosion of entrepreneurs in the capitalist system.

We are going to make sure that America is open to legal immigration because that is wealth and the talent and the entrepreneurial skills for the 21st Century.

I can't help but care about the rights of the people I used to shower with.

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

He'll call that trickle-down. I call it Niagara Falls.

There are no limits to our future if we don't put limits on our people.

We are all the sons or daughters of immigrants - some more recent than others - but all dedicated to the triumph of an idea that serves as the touchstone of what it means to be an American. This America is the only America that we have hitherto known - if being conservative has anything to do with conserving the principles of our past, then no conservative has any business bashing legal immigration.

Councils of war breed timidity and defeatism.

The real problem is deflation. That is the opposite of inflation but equally serious to the borrower.

Winning is like shaving - you do it every day or you wind up looking like a bum.

I believe in civil liberties for homosexuals. I guess I'd have to say I'd draw the line at letting them teach in the schools.

The Soviet Union represents a threat in terms of might. It is a joke in terms of its economy and what it has to offer the Third World - a laughingstock to countries that are looking for an economic-development model.

My wife had a miscarriage. We have rarely talked about it. It did make me more aware of the sanctity of human life, how precious every child is.

I think Bush understands the Internet and the incredible expansion of global e-commerce.

I think it is important for all those young out there - who someday hope to play real football, where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands - [that] a distinction should be made that football is democratic capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist sport.

We want peace with all our hearts. But peace cannot be achieved through weakness.

The problem is that the economy isn't growing fast enough to accommodate the level of spending produced through the democratic process.

Democracy is not a mathematical deduction proved once and for all time. Democracy is a just faith fervently held, commitment to be tested again and again in the fiery furnace of history.

Pro football gave me a good sense of perspective to enter politics: I'd already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, traded and hung in effigy.

There is a kind of victory in good work, no matter how humble.

Ladies and gentlemen, communism didn't fall. It was pushed.

Its no secret that I've never liked tax credits.

There's no limit to what free men and free women in a free market with free enterprise can accomplish when people are free to follow their dream.

... giving tax incentives for more labor ownership of company stock will do more to create jobs and increase productivity than all the "emergency full employment" bills proposed.

The leaders of the Democratic Party aren't soft on Communism. They're soft on Democracy.

I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.

My passion for ideas is not matched with a passion for partisan or electoral politics.

I can't hide my feelings.

We must win the war on poverty by enlisting the greatest weapon ever invented - free enterprise

When people lack jobs, opportunity, and ownership of property they have little or no stake in their communities.

The chance to own a home; chance to own an education; chance to get access to capital. This is the real civil rights battle of the twenty-first century.

All too often the Democratic Party has taken the black vote for granted, and all too often the Republican Party has written it off.

Democracy without morality is impossible.

With the end of the cold war, all the 'isms' of the 20th century - Fascism, Nazism, Communism and the evil of apartheid-ism - have failed. Except one. Only democracy has shown itself true the help of all mankind.

There's only one race - it's human. We are all brothers and sisters.

I can't understand why the Democratic parties seem so hostile to economic growth and business.

I don't use labels a lot.

Lately the First Amendment has been interpreted to deny equal protection of the law to those who believe in God. The Constitution established freedom for religion, not freedom from religion!

Republicans many times can't get the words 'equality of opportunity' out of their mouths. Their lips do not form that way.

I have come to think that capital punishment should be abolished.

I learned about the market's power when I was traded to the Buffalo Bills for $100.

You don't boo at a Kemp rally. You boo at football games.

Some people have theorized that I lurched to prove myself intellectually. But it was not any lurch. It was more a kind of awakening.